How does change design work?

The future is uncertain it could be difficult to prepare for. Countries and societies face, excessive or insufficient precipitation, rising sea levels, extreme temperature changes, storms, droughts, floods, and other climate hazards. Automatization of business processes and technological advancement can lead to changes in jobs that we currently have available and could lead to either greater unemployment or greater employment with meaningful jobs. While these are some of the external changes, such as climate change, changes in consumer preferences, automatisation of business processes, human rights and ethical changes in business processes, wars, shortage of skilled labour, recession, inflation that organisations are faced with, which require a change inside the organisation. However, also internal negative changes fuel the need for improvement and change design. Problems such as turnover of employees, low job satisfaction, human errors, low profitability, customer dissatisfaction and more, all contribute towards the need to implement changes necessary to improve performance of the organisation.

The reason for change design comes usually from negative problems or changes happening either in the internal or external environment, which requires the change in the system to be better prepared for future or current organisational needs. All these changes require change design within or in-between organisations. The situation is that individuals, organisations, and countries often know where the problem lies, however what often happens is that they need to know how to reach the solution to the given problem fast. This is where designing and implementation of changes comes in, when combining various sciences from economics, management, physics and organisational theory we can design the change that encompasses our understanding of human behaviour, while simultaneously considering social, natural and economic sciences. 

The same principles may apply for organisations on a local or global scale, inside one organisation or inside several organisations. Change design works to align the strategic directions for change with people in the position of power to implement the change to improve the system. Simultaneously change design through the power of workshops also works with people at different levels of the organisation to provide support in the implementation of the strategy, which can help to facilitate the behaviour and execution behind the strategic change directives set.

We seek for a solution that would create stellar organisations. Such organisations ensure adequate performance of the system from social, economic and environmental domain. Sustainable organisations are able to harness the power of behavioural strategy and set up both short term as well as long term strategy. Such organisations are resilient, which makes them able to transform, adapt and innovate in order to ensure a sustainable performance of the system.

Organisations often spend large amount of resources to seek a solution, which can be time-consuming, in some cases years it may take years before they find the solution and many problems never become resolved. Change design enables us to design a change based on research, behavioural science and testing different procedures of execution of changes fast. In this way, change design simply investigates how to improve and design the system in a way that has the capacity to create an improvement over long term towards resolving the reoccurring problems

Sometimes it may come as a change in the stakeholder that handles the problem, or in the way that organisations interact between each other. It could be that the improvement of culture is needed, the improvement in employer branding, marketing, communication, or sometimes the problem is in the lack of motivation where research on understanding of the human behaviour can help us facilitate an improvement of the system by implementing what drives the human motivation within the strategic domain. Sometimes it may be in the way employees approach customers or in the way that we work to fulfil the employees needs, while other times, it may come as a profound change like changing the meaning of what meaningful work means, changing the culture or improving the strategies by designing a technological solution that enables better execution of the change within the organisation. 

The opportunities for change are vast, which is why the design of the change never becomes exhaustible, even within one organisation this creates the change, new need for change inside organisation or other organisations as well can arise. This is how, it becomes necessary to continue designing the change. Change design provides the leader with proposal for the improvement of the system that can create change at the individual, organisational, national or international level. In fact, change design works best when we work to solve a far-reaching problem that involves multiple stakeholders and organisations, that need to work together to create improvement of the system. 

To design changes, we have to understand first what the goal and primary objective behind the change is, who are the stakeholders involved, what is the present situation, what is the desirable situation and finally the timeline in which we could achieve the change. Whenever we do not consider all these aspects, it can create volatile situations. However, any change also creates the massive and impactful opportunities for change for improvements in order for organisations to evolve. When we set big goals we can proceed towards greater changes within the system, which is sometimes desirable while other times less so. It all depends on leaders ability to lead the change and how likely it is that the change will be adopted by the organisation.  Next step is really understanding the problem and the hypothesis behind it. The way you can do such, is to truly understand the stakeholders involved and how they relate to each other. The stakeholders can be segmented into internal (employees, manager, owners), as well as external (suppliers, society, government, creditors, shareholders and costumers). We start by listening to several perspectives and trying to understand the underlying principles that follow from every set of interaction among these stakeholders. The most important thing is whether we are asking the right questions and to the right people, as well as listening and adapting to changes to your approach. 

When we are designing changes a change designer must take people and behavioural characteristics into account as it is crucial in ensuring that the strategy will succeed. Furthermore, after you devise the steps needed in change design we may consider setting up the timeline. However, sometimes in a short time frame, you may not be able to change the norm or the attitudes, this is when sometimes it is better not to implement the timeline so it can be adapted. When designing the change, you must always weigh the cost of implementing changes and how will the change be accepted by the people.  

Other times, bold timelines will become the solution. However, with speed comes caution about how the changes will impact the change needed to be achieved and various stakeholders involved. This requires us to adjust to the right speed and not overly push the change to the levels that are not able to be managed by the humans and organisations. Going too fast on speed can require you to change different parts of the system, which are not always able to adapt to the change in such a fast way. Fast adoption of changes is an opportunity, but it also requires caution and higher alertness to know how much change will be required for the solution, what will be the systems response and how fast will the change be implemented. Which is why, it is important to consider this in your design of the change, before you implement it holistically. 

However, here the question becomes, what information is relevant to us solving the problem and what information isn’t? The more we know, the less clear the picture becomes, if we discern the information and look for underlying principles that merge the interactions together and change the outcome in profound ways, we may be able to find the solutions to change the behaviour, organisation, or organisations.  As the solution and change is set on, the design of this change may come into place. The design requires understanding the steps needed to be taken to achieve the change, however this may not be the same for every part of the organisation, every stakeholder inside of the organisation, every solution, or every societal change we may try to achieve. Sometimes these steps differ, they may be considering what the practical solution may be and then require us to change the outcome of it. 

When designing the changes we search for the information in terms of people that are relevant stakeholders to the solution we are seeking to address. We always aim to search for the solution that bridges the gap between stakeholders, systems and inter-systems interactions in order to reach a holistic solution that will benefit all parties in the end. 

Change design goes a step further than the classic consulting, where we in the solution itself consider both the operational aspects of implementing the solution and the problems that might incur when implementing the solution. We provide the solution that takes into account the people aspects and how people can be utilised to reach a desirable end state.